The Lady, or the Tiger

In the very olden time there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose
ideas, though somewhat polished and sharpened by the
progressiveness of distant Latin neighbors, were still large,
florid, and untrammeled, as became the half of him which was
barbaric. He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an
authority so irresistible that, at his will, he turned his varied
fancies into facts. He was greatly given to self-communing, and,
when he and himself agreed upon anything, the thing was done.
When every member of his domestic and political systems moved
smoothly in its appointed course, his nature was bland and genial;
but, whenever there was a little hitch, and some of his orbs got
out of their orbits, he was blander and more genial still, for
nothing pleased him so much as to make the crooked straight and
crush down uneven places.

Among the borrowed notions by which his barbarism had become
semified was that of the public arena, in which, by exhibitions of
manly and beastly valor, the minds of his subjects were refined
and cultured.

But even here the exuberant and barbaric fancy asserted itself
The arena of the king was built, not to give the people an
opportunity of hearing the rhapsodies of dying gladiators, nor to
enable them to view the inevitable conclusion of a conflict
between religious opinions and hungry jaws, but for purposes far
better adapted to widen and develop the mental energies of the
people. This vast amphitheater, with its encircling galleries, its
mysterious vaults, and its unseen passages, was an agent of
poetic justice, in which crime was punished, or virtue rewarded,
by the decrees of an impartial and incorruptible chance.

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When a subject was accused of a crime of sufficient importance
to interest the king, public notice was given that on an appointed
day the fate of the accused person would be decided in the king's
arena, a structure which well deserved its name, for, although its
form and plan were borrowed from afar, its purpose emanated
solely from the brain of this man, who, every barleycorn a king,
knew no tradition to which he owed more allegiance than pleased
his fancy, and who ingrafted on every adopted form of human
thought and action the rich growth of his barbaric idealism.

When all the people had assembled in the galleries, and the king,
surrounded by his court, sat high up on his throne of royal state
on one side of the arena, he gave a signal, a door beneath him
opened, and the accused subject stepped out into the
amphitheater. Directly opposite him, on the other side of the
inclosed space, were two doors, exactly alike and side by side. It
was the duty and the privilege of the person on trial to walk
directly to these doors and open one of them. He could open either
door he pleased; he was subject to no guidance or influence but
that of the aforementioned impartial and incorruptible chance. If
he opened the one, there came out of it a hungry tiger, the
fiercest and most cruel that could be procured, which
immediately sprang upon him and tore him to pieces as a
punishment for his guilt. The moment that the case of the
criminal was thus decided, doleful iron bells were clanged, great
wails went up from the hired mourners posted on the outer rim of
*the arena, and the vast audience, with bowed heads and downcast
hearts, wended slowly their homeward way, mourning greatly
that one so young and fair, or so old and respected, should have
merited so dire a fate.